Meeting of Two Cultures

The meeting of two strong cultures in Australia is a time which is said to have been one of the most difficult and inharmonious in history. The meeting of the Aboriginals, the indigenous people of Australia, who had been inhabitants of Australia for at least 50,000 years, and the first European settlers, who are said to first have settled around 200 years ago.
When and how the Aboriginal people came to Australia is an on-going debate and there is such speculation that we cannot know definitively. They were thought to have arrived there by boat from South East Asia during the last ice age. Aboriginal tribes are the longest living civilisation on earth, estimations of the time of their arrival in Australia range from 100,000 years to 50,000 years, which nevertheless is an incredible amount of time. Australia was already the home for up to one million Aboriginal people who lived across the continent, at the time of European settlement. They were scattered in 300 groups and spoke 250 languages and 700 dialects, they travelled widely to trade, hunt and gather food and to go on spiritual journeys. The groups lived together in their own territory with their own language and followed a strict legal system, which was based on good morals, and was orally recorded during the dreaming. All in all the indigenous people were a peaceful people although there were conflicts between the groups. Aborigines had thousands of years to develop a culture based on beautiful and complex beliefs. They have many different deities, rather than just one God, who fulfil several duties in the circle of life. All Aboriginal share a belief in the timeless, magical realm of Dreamtime. Dreamtime is the time of creation, of ancestral spirits forging the land and beings on it. Many of the stories of the Dreamtime link to the landscape and animals. To Aboriginals the land was sacred and they treated it with respect, always giving back to nature that provided them with everything they needed to